Patricia Belcher

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Old age is usually seen as a sad time to reflect on your life's work and morn you past friends. For Carol (Blythe Danner), an elderly widow, this is the case. That is, until her friends force her back into the dating game. She is beginning to realise that her day to day life is becoming monotonous, yet she soon enough meets Bill (Sam Elliot). A retiree himself, Bill reminds her that even at the supposed twilight years of your life, there is still a chance to begin all over again.

After spectacularly losing a local spelling bee as a youngster, the now 40-year-old Guy Trilby is determined to go back and change it. Having developed his spelling ability substantially over the decades, he decides to enter the National Quill Spelling Bee after discovering a loophole which states that anyone past the 8th grade cannot compete. Having given up on academic achievement before he passed 8th grade, the contest's judges struggle to deny him the opportunity to compete despite arrant fury from parents of potential winners who believe that his age now gives him an advantage. Initially rude and insulting towards his pre-pubescent competitors, he soon starts to develop a friendship with Chaitainya; an enthusiastic young boy with no friends who Guy takes under his wing. However, not everyone's happy with what Guy ends up teaching Chaitainya about the world.

Guy Trilby is a 40-year-old man who dropped out of high school as a young boy and remains bitter about losing a spelling bee. Thus, now older and wiser, he finds a way to enter the National Quill Spelling Bee by abusing a loophole which states that anyone past the 8th grade cannot compete. As he abandoned his studies before passing 8th grade, he decides that he has every right to qualify for the competition, to the annoyance of entrants' parents and contest officials alike as, of course, his age gives him an unfair advantage despite his educational failures. Along the way he meets a young boy named Chaitainya who appears to have no friends his own age and who Guy Trilby gladly takes under his debauched, f-word riddled wing.

Everyone who insists that romantic comedies have to be predictable and formulaic should see this film. Not only is it charming and funny, but it takes a strikingly original approach that leaves a big, stupid grin on your face.

Tom (Gordon-Levitt) is a shy greeting-card creator who's instantly smitten when he meets Summer (Deschanel), although it's not until Day 4 that he realises he's falling for her. But when things start heating up, she tells him she wants to keep it casual without getting serious. A happy non-relationship ensues, but by Day 300 he's in abject misery. His friends (Arend and Gubler) aren't much help, and even his smart little sister (Moretz) can't offer him any useful advice.

What's with Hollywood and road trips? Lately it seems like everything evolves from adventures while traveling across highways and small towns. To the credit of the filmmakers who think of these common ideas, most of the time, at least for the time being, these ideas work well.

This year alone, we have seen plenty of eventful stuff occur on the road. From the comedy Jay and Silent Bob to the thriller Joy Ride, it's been anything but your ordinary drive across the nation. This time out, fear takes the road trip in the surprisingly effective monster movie Jeepers Creepers.

One of the hallmarks of typical horror movies is that the characters are invariably stupid. No matter how much you holler at the screen, they still open that closet door, they still run the wrong way down that dark hallway and they never get away when given a perfectly good opportunity to do so. Most of the time they're so stupid you find yourself actually hoping they'll get killed just to put them out of your misery.

"Jeepers Creepers" is just such a horror movie -- made all the worse by the fact that writer-director Victor Salva ("Powder") actually tries to justify the idiotic actions of his primary pinheads.

When 20-ish brother and sister (Justin Long and Gina Philips) see a dark figure dumping bloody bodies down a remote roadside culvert while on their way home from college, they spend an entire scene convincing themselves that the right thing to do would be to go back and crawl in the culvert to see if anyone is alive in there. One suggests they just call the police. The other replies, "There's no pay phone for miles!" then adds, "What if it was you?"